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Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

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Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#321

Post by lolinder »

rayiner wrote: post #310
lolinder wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a perspective that's really hard for someone in the US to understand. When people here make the exact same arguments that you're making, it sounds xenophobic and dangerous. It's the stuff of Trumpism and MAGA. However, in the context of a true nation state, the exact same words can mean something very different. When we in the United States try to claim that immigration would hurt our sovereignty as a people,…

> This is a perspective that's really hard for someone in the US to understand. When people here make the exact same arguments that you're making, it sounds xenophobic and dangerous. It's the stuff of Trumpism and MAGA. It’s hard for a minority of Americans, who happen to control the media and institutions, to understand. That minority is freaking out because Trump voters in Idaho have a similar understanding of nati…

> You’re correct that it’s important for Americans not to project their sensibilities onto others. But it’s also important for cosmopolitan urban Americans not to project their sensibilities onto other Americans. A significant chunk of America is populated by the immigrant groups that developed the region in the first place.

For the record, I'm not a cosmopolitan urban American. I'm in a deep red state in flyover country. My ancestors (and my wife's) were the first settlers here. I'm proud of my ancestry, and I feel a deep connection with that past. I know exactly what it's like to be living in a place that your ancestors settled and to feel like it's changing.

However, I also take great issue with the Republican rhetoric surrounding immigration. I'm not talking about stereotyped rhetoric imagined in the left-wing media, I'm talking about conversations I regularly have over dinner or around the water cooler. I'm talking about growing up under the impression that Hispanic people were either lazy or drug dealers and that if we let too many of them in they'd ruin the country for "real" Americans.

I'm opposed to American nationalism because when I finally had the chance to interact with large numbers of immigrants, they not only didn't match the stereotypes, they were exactly the opposite in every way. I'm opposed to American nationalism because my ancestors left their homes and moved out West looking to get away from prejudice and hate—because they built a new world out here in collaboration with a lot of people who were very different than they were—and I owe it to their memories to be willing to do the same. They were no strangers to change, so I don't know why I should expect to be.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#323

Post by [deleted] »

lolinder wrote: post #321
rayiner wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a perspective that's really hard for someone in the US to understand. When people here make the exact same arguments that you're making, it sounds xenophobic and dangerous. It's the stuff of Trumpism and MAGA. It’s hard for a minority of Americans, who happen to control the media and institutions, to understand. That minority is freaking out because Trump voters in Idaho have a similar understanding of nati…

> You’re correct that it’s important for Americans not to project their sensibilities onto others. But it’s also important for cosmopolitan urban Americans not to project their sensibilities onto other Americans. A significant chunk of America is populated by the immigrant groups that developed the region in the first place. For the record, I'm not a cosmopolitan urban American. I'm in a deep red state in flyover cou…

[deleted]

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#324

Post by rayiner »

lolinder wrote: post #321
rayiner wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a perspective that's really hard for someone in the US to understand. When people here make the exact same arguments that you're making, it sounds xenophobic and dangerous. It's the stuff of Trumpism and MAGA. It’s hard for a minority of Americans, who happen to control the media and institutions, to understand. That minority is freaking out because Trump voters in Idaho have a similar understanding of nati…

> You’re correct that it’s important for Americans not to project their sensibilities onto others. But it’s also important for cosmopolitan urban Americans not to project their sensibilities onto other Americans. A significant chunk of America is populated by the immigrant groups that developed the region in the first place. For the record, I'm not a cosmopolitan urban American. I'm in a deep red state in flyover cou…

[flagged]

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#325

Post by codekansas »

ZainRiz wrote: post #280
mandevil wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This- fixing property tax to purchase price- is exactly what California's Prop 13 did, which has ended up gutting California local governments ( https://edsource.org/2022/californias-prop-13s-unjust-legacy... ). It has resulted in lots of people who aren't paying their fair share into the upkeep of their community, and driving CA house prices insane. It's been a giant fiasco, hurting California's growth, and locking…

Is the claim here that the city's spending needs went up much faster than inflation? If so, why?

Not OP, but one reason could be that if a lot of early infrastructure was debt financed, cities will have an increasingly harder time paying for infrastructure maintenance over time

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#327

Post by khmmr »

legitster wrote: post #98
nhchris wrote: post #15

The article is valid in speaking specifically about US states competing, but otherwise I find the idea of treating governments, and countries, as mere economic platforms, that compete like a business would, disturbing. They are representatives of their nations, and their duty is to their people, to whom they are guardians, of said people and their homelands. They should not be 'competing' for more residents just as f…

How is this not just pure, racist nationalism? Where you live is not a family. If you are born unlucky geographically it seems like you should absolutely have the right to improve your lot.

> If you are born unlucky geographically it seems like you should absolutely have the right to improve your lot.

You absolutely have the right to improve your lot, if by lot you mean the portion of land you were born in. I would even go as far as to say you have the duty to care for it. However, you don't have the right to take other peoples lot, their identity and society from them just because you were born unlucky and they were in your opinion born unfairly lucky. What you are advocating in practice is the destruction of all smaller ethnic groups, local traditions and cultural diversity of the world by overriding everything with unstable and internally conflicting pseudo-culture (or maybe a bit more politely worded pop-culture) and identity policies promoted by the wokeist Americans. This modern, woke American imperialism hiding behind the cover of liberty and personal freedoms is in practice almost as evil and destructive as the reactionary imperialism of Russia.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#328

Post by zamnos »

notch898a wrote: post #294
bumby wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was referring to something different. Property taxes are the way local municipalities raise funds. Tax liens are just the same property tax. I’m suggesting there can be other funding mechanisms, from VAT to income or even automation taxes that raise that money without the same tradeoffs.

Sure, you could charge people directly for services. Want school? Pay for school tuition. Want roads? Pay the toll. Want fire service? Pay for fire subscription. etc. I'd be happy to live in such community but others want men with guns to come toss them out of their house if they don't have the money for the extra services. To me that sounds worse but to each their own.

Would you really though?That sounds like you'd just get nickle and dimed to death. Look at what happened with streaming services. It used to just be Netflix, but now that's but one service of many. So some people pay $100/month to get all the services, other people pick and choose, others have moved back to torrenting media. I dunno about you but it seems like things were better as a viewer when it was just Netflix and Hulu. And that's just for watching movies and tv. I can't imagine what it would be like if it was for critical things like the police. Actually, wouldn't a police subscription devolve with the existence of rival police departments, and then they'd actually fight with each other instead of chasing criminals? Or they'd come by your house and demand payment for the police and unless you paid, a thief might just happen to know your house was unprotected and burgle your house? The incentives under that system seem all sorts of perverse.

Fire subscription seems like it would only be workable in a barely suburban or actually rural environment, where your house burning down won't also catch your neighbor's house on fire. Anything more dense and the whole block would go up in flames, including your house, if one of your neighbors didn't pay and the fire department didn't immediately extinguish the fire in their house.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#329

Post by geysersam »

hermannj314 wrote: post #16

I've owned houses in two cities in my life. One called itself "A developer-friendly community" and the other "A healthy community" The cities were organized around their taglines. One was 300 years old and focused on parks, trails, conservancy, and community centers. The other a younger city focused on growth and sprawl, tax abatements, and new businesses. You should live where the government aligns with your phase o…

Citizensare entitled to change their municipalities (or prevent change) by campaigning and voting.

It's quite neo-liberal to tell people to just vote with their feet. When rents in your neighborhoo skyrocket because the local leadership has decided to gentrify the area to improve tax revenue, many would agree that's not entirely just to the long term residents.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#330

Post by [deleted] »

mikem170 wrote: post #297
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original post I was asking for further details is about borders, not passport. That said, passports have been around near as long as borders, just did not have the smart chip embedded in them. Letters of recommendations or safe passage to pass a port have been around nearly as long as the notion of sovereign boundaries. It might have been a parchment with a wax seal, a ring, or a stick with a burn-mark, maybe eve…

I saw that there were passport documents for safety in the past, like you mentioned. I've also heard of documents called passports being used to grant foreigners permission to conduct commerce, and others allowing locals to move between provinces within a country. I wonder about borders, too. I wonder when they started guarding borders like they do today. I know there were places with minimal border control, like the…

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